Is Software Driving a Falling Demand For Brains? 622
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Paul Krugman writes in the NY Times that information technology seems to be reducing, not increasing, the demand for highly educated workers (reg. may be required), because a lot of what highly educated workers do could actually be replaced by sophisticated information processing. One good recent example is how software is replacing the teams of lawyers who used to do document research. 'From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,' says Bill Herr, a lawyer at a major chemical company who used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. 'People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don't.' If true this raises a number of interesting questions. 'One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that the big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war,' writes Krugman. 'Another is how we [can] have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can't command a middle-class income.' Remember the Luddites weren't the poorest of the poor, they were skilled artisans whose skills had suddenly been devalued by new technology."
This is gonna be very rant like (Score:5, Insightful)
We don’t need less skilled and educated people. What we need are more skilled jobs to put them in. Obviously way easier said then done. As technology advances, certain jobs, even entire trades, are going to become obsolete. I don’t think technology is even close to a point where we can’t come up with something for the more intelligent chunks of society to do.
The whole damn system is broken! Everything has to be immediately profitable or at least have demonstratable potential for future profitability. We are very good at improving on the stuff we already have because of this, but we seem to suck at coming up with completely new stuff. A lot of the cool stuff we have now came out of the cold war, because the powers were throwing money at scientists in the hopes of getting something cool before the “other guy” did. We need some more of that. We need ridiculous amounts of money thrown at scientists and engineers with no stipulations or requirements to show progress. You’ll have some serious waste.. but I think you’ll come up with some neat stuff as well.
I also think as a society it’s time to move away from the 5+ day work week. We have enough technology now that there is no reason for the majority of the population to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week working. How we get the ball rolling on this one I don’t know. The economy seems to be geared more towards people working more than less. Remember back when having a two income family really put you on top. Then everyone started to do it and the economy adjusted. Now you need that just to get by. We need to do that in reverse then keep going!
Re:This is gonna be very rant like (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the whole system is broken. I've been saying for years that we need to racially reform society as less and less work is available. Even though it will be a very long time (if ever) before computers can take over research for instance, they can take over pretty much any repetitive taks in the medium term, including many white collar jobs. I'm an advocate of instituting a basic income, so that everyone can can have a decent life even if there is no work available. The arguments against has always been that people won't want to work, but really those very few who don't want to work at all in a world were very little work is available shouldn't, leave it to those who do, they will be much more motivated.
Roald Dahl called this 50 years ago... (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the moral of the story? If your job is in danger of becoming redundant because a robot (or piece of software) can do your job, you'd better start educating yourself so that you can get a job fixing the machine (or piece of software) that does your old job. Humans need to focus on work that humans are good at, and not try to compete at tedious repetitive things (screwing lids onto toothpaste, parsing long contracts with fixed logical rules) which machines (and software) are inherently better at.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
What is currently being eliminated are jobs that do not require imagination or deeper insights. On the high end, people of all qualifications are even more in demand than ever, because the computers cannot do their job without them. Working AI is not even remotely on the horizon, it is still completely unknown how it could be done. And this also means it is completely unknown whether a working AI would have issues like motivation, etc.. What is also completely unknown is whether an AI would actually be as smart as a human being and how much computing power it would need to even get to human average level. There is some indication that when you look at interconnect, the human brain is within one order or magnitude of what is possible in this universe. Get larger, and you get slower because of longer ways. Get smaller, and you cannot fit in as many interconnects.
Coming back to the job market, the problem is with a lot of jobs that can be learned and do not require very smart or flexible or imaginative people. As these are where the middle-class mostly takes its income from, these jobs vanishing is a huge problem. As it seems there is really no way to prevent that, I think the solution must either go into the direction people starting to share jobs, while retaining their before income (otherwise spending power of the population goes down the drain), or something radical, like a base-income provided from tax money (corporate taxes, really) that you can live off reasonably well. Obviously, the time for the latter has not quite come yet, but it is one of the very few options how the economy is not going to implode in the longer run. The high-skill jobs would still be filled. Talented people want to exercise their talents. The question is what the medium skill range will do. However, the absolute worst approach would of course be to let them all slide into poverty. That could only lead to massive destabilization, finally ending in disintegration of society. It is absolutely imperative that most people have a good chance at a reasonable life.
Re:The Beginning of a Larger Future Change (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Surely it's a rising demand for brains (Score:5, Insightful)
Overly-simplistic analysis: you forgot about scalability.
Q1: What happens when a small web cluster and 5 programmers can create software that can replace hundreds or thousands of lawyers?
A1: You get hundreds or thousands of lawyers who are now unemployed.
Q2: Can't those lawyers be retrained as programmers?
A2: Some of them -- it really depends on whether the lawyer thinks in the manner necessary to do so. Do they know how to use a keyboard? The younger ones do. Do they understand the basics of their OS? Virtually none do. Do they have math skills and/or algorithmic skills? Very few do - that's often the reason they become lawyers in the first place! [1] Most lawyers are people who came from non-technical majors, like history or English -- fields they studied precisely because they didn't like math or science.
Conclusion: The lawyers, then -- like the factory workers before them -- are not retrainable into these newer, higher-skilled jobs that are "moving their cheese". That this was ever an option is one of the great intellectual frauds of economists. [2]
But the problem does not go away merely because we do not want to think about it. What do we do with this swath of unemployed sharks? What do we do with the swath of unemployed blue-collar laborers, whose jobs are being/have been roboticized? These are groups that exist, or are beginning to exist, NOW.
And what about in 5 years? 10? 20? What do we do with the maids when homes and offices are all fully-cleaned by robots? What do we do with the truck drivers when Google's autonomous car AI controls the semis? etc.
The only people with a realistic answer to this other than the Social Darwinists (whose answer I consider unrealistic) are the socialists... and I say that as a largely anti-socialist, moderate left-libertarian myself.
[1] With apologies to a close friend, who is a Java developer turned grad-school mathematician turned lawyer. They deride the idea that most lawyers are intelligent, and they routinely point out to me errors in their logic that any freshman CS student would not make... but which are nonetheless regularly made in court, and which may be responsible for locking-away clients for years or decades.
[2] Disclaimer: I'm both a professional developer, and have undergrad academic credentials in both CS and Econ.
Re:This is gonna be very rant like (Score:5, Insightful)
As to socialism "never" working:
Every successful society, from the industrial age forward, has included some mix of socialism and capitalism...
"pure" socialism is a nightmare, but so is "pure" capitalism, unless you happen to be in one of the super-rich old money families that inevitably end up controlling nearly everything in the corrupt banana republic that results.
Re:This is gonna be very rant like (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember back when having a two income family really put you on top. Then everyone started to do it and the economy adjusted. Now you need that just to get by. We need to do that in reverse then keep going!
Part of the problem (if perceived as such) is that people expect certain non-necessities as par. There is a lot of wasted spending. No one needs 500+ channels of satellite television, costing $150/mo or more. A family does not need two brand new cars, paying $300+ for each note or monthly lease payment, when they could have slightly used vehicles for far less. Even buying an efficient hybrid car is actually less economically feasible. It costs around $32k for a Prius -- that could be a $500/mo bill depending on money put down. When you consider how much fuel most use in a month...definitely not more than a hundred gallons on average (I think I use about 30-35 gallons a month, with a V6 engine), the cost of the car outweighs its benefit of mpg. Even a 1-year-used Prius can cut the price down by over $10000, and thereby the monthly payments by about a third. No need to even venture into the savings on insurance for used-vs-new! /. community would find a use for that, but that'd be a lot of traffic to consistently occupy. These are just a couple of examples where people could cut out or significantly reduce their spending. Maybe too few children are learning basic economics from their parents or school systems.
Your average household will never use 50 Mb/sec of bandwidth internally or externally not even if they've got all of the cousins and friends over to have a LAN party -- maybe some of the
I understand as well as anyone that technology can improve the quality of life, but there is a point where it goes beyond improving and becomes a burden. I don't believe everyone will lead spartan lives just to save a few bucks, nor should that be necessary. Really, it is a point of personal responsibility and accountability. My old security chief said it well: "Buy what you need, save for what you want."
More not fewer brains (Score:4, Insightful)
Over my working life the trend has been to devalue a liberal arts education and replace it with very specific skills training (at great cost). But the student is making a bet that what they are learning will still be needed when they graduate and seek to pay off their education loans. Problem is that in the old days the employers expected to train new hires to their specific needs and industry -- but today that is all on the prospective employee. This is a sucker bet at best. The problem is that the jobs that supported the middle class are more or less gone and the employment needs of the moment are transitory.
I would suggest that one of the real disservices that HR departments have inflicted on employers is that they have no responsibility for their work force -- someone else should do all the training so the company gets the interchangeable skills they need at the moment, and discards them just as quickly. Problem is that to quickly re-train takes time and is best supported by a broad-based rather than narrow education. That ain't what we got.
The real question is more one of social engineering -- what kind of society do we want and how do we get there? For example, do we need or want a vast army of under-employed in a neo-feudal society? In reality, do people need to work at all to live a decent life? And if they don't, what do they do? Endless reality TV? Or a resurgence of dilettantism? Being retired, I would vote for the latter. But that requires intellectual skills of some sort -- in my view the product of a 'liberal arts' education. Not sure our profit-based fee for service model can get there.
One thing is clear -- more of the same just is not going to cut it. Particularly since the deck is stacked against the prospective job seeker.
Re:This is gonna be very rant like (Score:4, Insightful)
For the record, I'm Canadian!
And it would require a very fundemental change in the way things are done, which I readily admit I have no idea how we even start. It kind of involves getting away from money, or at least changing how money is implemented. At the end of the day it's paper. It serves the required purpose of rationing out real resources and services... but lately it seems like it does a very poor job of this. Too much skim off the top.. too much effort spent maintaining it.. whatever the reason, it has become very inefficient for this purpose.
We have the skilled people and the actual resources to do some awesome things... but we are preventing ourselves from doing them because of a completely ficticious element. Yes, these people and resources need to be regulated.. but when you have skilled people doing nothing and excess resources.. and people in other countries doing work those people in your country could be doing.. and using those extra resources.. something is very broken.
Re:This is gonna be very rant like (Score:5, Insightful)
Wasn't a shorter working week the promised outcome of technology? "If machines can do 40% of the work, we can all do a three-day week for the same money!"
Which, with hindsight, was naïve to say the least; the actual outcome is "If machines can do 40% of the work, I can lay off 40% of my work force. And then I can pay less to the remaining 60% because there's more competition for jobs!"
I don't know what the solution is, but I assume it involves either a sudden collective burst of altruism in employers (ho ho) or some truly massive government intervention (hee hee). Presumably most /. readers are in jobs which won't be machine-replaceable any time soon, but I do feel sympathy towards those who would have been productively employed on an assembly line had they been born fifty years earlier.
On an entirely different note, why does previewing a comment take the best part of a minute?
Re:This is gonna be very rant like (Score:5, Insightful)
"pure" socialism is a nightmare, but so is "pure" capitalism, unless you happen to be in one of the super-rich old money families that inevitably end up controlling nearly everything in the corrupt banana republic that results.
the problem is, in capitalism, humans exploit humans, in socialsim, it's the other way around.
Re:Roald Dahl called this 50 years ago... (Score:3, Insightful)
The story was about the one smart guy who evolved not the 20 who griped that they were losing their shitty job to a robot.
The story was about the one success story and completely ignored the 20 who lost their jobs and there was no robot-repairing job for them. You know, just like our government. We have more jobs now than a decade ago, but less of them are full-time and employment is down because people now have to work multiple jobs, meaning there are actually less available jobs, and less jobs capable of supporting a western lifestyle overall. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is as long as it's illegal to be poor, and it very much is.
Re:This is gonna be very rant like (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the whole system is broken. I've been saying for years that we need to racially reform society as less and less work is available.
I'm old enough to remember the sci-fi promise that more and more automation would allow humans more leisure time without sacrificing the necessities and comforts they were accustomed to. But that hasn't really come to pass, even with machines taking over human jobs. Instead. fewer people have work, many who still have work feel compelled to work more (so it looks harder) to keep their jobs, more people don't have jobs, and the ownership class has more and more in relation to the rest of us.
So how did that happen? I for one blame the Puritan Ethic. Those who have more are clearly blessed. Those who have less have less because they are less deserving: they are shiftless, lazy, unworthy. Even non-believing or not-particularly-religious people (at least here in the US) believe this philosophy, even if they don't know that's why they feel that way. Those with better jobs just know they are more deserving, simply because they have the job they do, the resources they do, the blessings they have. Ask almost any Libertarian-type here on Slashdot and you'll learn that they have what they have based solely on their own merit. Of course it's true, the very fact they have what they have proves it.
And here we are, still wanting a 20hr a week job and a robot butler, but instead we get to work 40+ hour weeks and some other guy gets 0 hours. At least it averages out to the promise of technology -- kinda like how a 60.2F annual average temperature in Oklahoma City amounts to a really comfortable climate.
Re:Roald Dahl called this 50 years ago... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's oddly, how you increase productivity in the long run. If 1000 workers create 1000 cars a year, and you find a way to automate that, so that now 500 people can make 1000 cars a year. The other 500 then could: make a second car company, that in turn produces 1000 cars a year, and reduces the price of cars for everyone, they could make better cars, and compete on quality, or they could go make something else entirely.
Either way, where there was once the value of 1000 cars split between 1000 workers, it is now split between 500 (+ added equipment maintenance), + what the other 500 people are producing.
Technology that lays people off is short term pain for long term gain. The more efficient it is to make more stuff, the more stuff ultimately gets made, which means the more stuff people can have. Retraining from one antiquated skill to a modern one is challenging, but macroscopically not a bad thing. For all its faults the great strength of the American system has always supposedly been your (their?) labour mobility, which is essentially the ability to move between jobs.
The big thing with software is that it's hitting industries that aren't used to competition, and when it hits it isn't gradual. Unlike the car business where bringing in new technology is done one plant at a time, and one part of a plant at a time, software can be instantly in the entire company or sector or world, and very quickly wipes out the use of a huge swath of people
Re:No, it's mainly the fault of the legal professi (Score:5, Insightful)
The jewish tribes could not empty a bottle in a river and kill off an entire ecosystem 100 km downstream. They couldn't mount a Ponzi scheme big enough to tear an entire nation down in its fall. Welcome to the 21th century...
Re:This is gonna be very rant like (Score:5, Insightful)
This is called socialism and has been tried the world over many many times and NEVER works. Technology usually leads to more different forms of work.
Spoken like a true Anonymous Coward! At least you have enough education to read your talking point card.
As the OP argued in his post spending Government money on long-term research (not something considered by most corporations these days, with quarterly profits to attend to) has been proven to provide powerful benefits (like this little ARPA project that you are using to disseminate your opinion).
The problem with just trusting in American corporations and unregulated capitalism to provide jobs, and a decent standard of living, to Americans is the technology does lead to different forms of work, but technology plus low wages leads to bigger corporate profits, so the jobs go overseas.
Socialist policies (by American standards) never, ever work - except of course in every other industrialized country in the world. These policies aren't in the interest of the Murdochs and Kochs of the world, so constant demonization is required to hide the fact that alternatives to the American corporatist approach do work better for the workers.
BTW - did you realize that Americans now work longer hours than even the Japanese? Only emerging economies work longer hours than the U.S. - check the OECD stats [oecd.org] . There are already several industrialized nations (Netherlands, Denmark for example) that work shorter hours and have higher real wages than the U.S. Too small to count? Well Sweden and France, those cesspools of socialism, work shorter hours and have real wages almost exactly the same as the U.S. and the trend is going against America.
Constantly shouting "We're number one!" while already in the number three or four slot ensures we will meet numbers 5,6,7, etc. going up as we go farther and farther down.
It is worfe than Krugman can imagine! (Score:4, Insightful)
Upon succefsfully returning with the time traveler to his home era, I difcovered that farming, which ufed to employ the vast majority of my countrymen, is now accomplifhed by mechanical clockworks under the supervifion of only a few percent of the populace! Surely the vaft majority of people in the colonies are now out of work!
Re:This is gonna be very rant like (Score:3, Insightful)
Businesses have entry barriers (Score:5, Insightful)
The other 500 then could: make a second car company
And buy the land how? And buy the necessary government regulatory licenses how? And license the essential patents how? (Unpatented cars are not street legal due to increases in government standards for safety, fuel efficiency, and emissions control, all of which require patented processes.) And fight covenants not to compete how? There are entry barriers against laid-off workers starting their own business to compete with their former employers.
Automation doesn't cause any unemployment at all. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, ignorance of basic economic science on Slashdot once again. If productivity (automation, 1 man can do the work of 4, etc.) created unemployment, we would be at 99% unemployment or so by now. Instead, unemployment has been mostly stable, on a historical scale. 10% is actually about the unemployment pre Civil War, IIRC. So why, even though the avg. worker is 20x as productive as we were 200 years ago (a guess, I'm too lazy to look up the actual figures, but suffice to say our productivity has gone up a LOT thanks to automation) are we are not working 20x less hours? we have lots of extra stuff and services. Obviously this extra productivity hasn't stolen jobs yet. No, the extra productivity didn't disappear, it went into more stuff ("higher standard of living", for economists)
I'm not joking. On the macro level, all of that excess productivity gets channeled into making extra "stuff" that people want to buy. If everyone were happy with a 1810 standard of living, there would be no one to buy this extra stuff, and there would be much less work (because that excess productivity is wasted). But since we like having a standard of living higher than that of the average 1810 worker, there is demand for extra stuff. That's where the extra productivity goes. So while it takes fewer people to harvest food/make industrial widgets than it did in 1810 thanks to machines, the people who would have been working on the farm in 1810 are instead hard at work making cars, computers, telephones, and providing services that weren't cheap/widely available in 1810 like modern medicine, tour guides, or yoga training.
But ok, you want to take this extra productivity gain and translate it into more free time, not more stuff. It is still possible to do this, if you can find the right part-time job. Let's say you work for $10/hr for 20 hours a week, that's a half work-week.. That's $800/month. If you're willing to downsize to a 1810's lifestyle, it's very possible to live on $800/month. (For the purposes of this discussion we're ignoring gov't assistance). No telephone, no electricity, smaller house (a shack in the woods is nice), cheaper food (McD's probably more cost-efficient calorie- and protein-wise than an 1810 meal - meat was EXPENSIVE back then because they were more valuable as farm animals). Of course if you have medical bills you are sunk, but they didn't have modern medicine in the 1810's either. You can do this because you live in a high-productivity economy, and you have chosen to trade that extra productivity for free time, not for higher standard of living. As it happens, most people like a modern standard of living, and enjoying the benefits of modern science, so they work a full work-week instead.
On a national level, we can see a similar pattern in other countries. Underdeveloped countries still have low productivity and low levels of automation. People in these countries work full hours and have a low standard of living - they're basically 100 yrs behind us. There are some socialist developed countries that have, on a national level, decided to trade productivity for more free time, not more stuff. So the French worker gets 3 months of vacation a year, but has less stuff than the average American worker - smaller car, smaller house, smaller TV, less stuff (this is reflected in consumption statistics), less food (probably a good thing all in all). America didn't go that route, because we're not lazy like the French. Also, we kind of like being the biggest kid on the block, and that means work. But if YOU want that kind of lifestyle, if you make the right kind of decisions/are smart with career planning it is possible to downsize your life and trade excess productivity for time. Instead of devoting your education/work life to climbing the career ladder, devote it to engineering an exit into a decently compensated part-time, contract, or freelance position. Then reap the benefits of extra time. No robot butler yet, though, sorry. Of course if you WANTED a robot butler, you'd have to work full-time to af